Parousia: A Fanfic of the Earth's Last Days
by Chaltab
Summary: As the world broils under the madness of Nicolae Carpathia, strangers from another world, a world of aliens and detectives, mutants and magicians, find themselves tossed into the cauldron. But when the Teen Titans fight the Antichrist, the Tribulation Force is forced to choose: will they be heroes or spectators? Special Thanks to Fred Clarke and Legend Maker!
1. Point of Divergence

**Parousia**

**A Left Behind – Teen Titans Crossover**

_Note: The Titans herein depicted are based on the animated series, though in a fanfic continuity that has progressed several years into the future. New Titans have been added, Robin is Tim Drake, and even Beast Boy has left his teen years behind. The Left Behind timeline here is probably a jumbled mess, but I no longer have any of the early books handy to reference._

_Check out the works of Legend Maker or look up the Titan Legends Wiki for more info._

* * *

**Chapter One**

**Point of Divergence**

Light, tumbling, end over end. Noise and pain and then air, sweet oxygenated air. Robin clawed his way up from the frazzle that consumed his brain and awoke in darkness. There was damp and cold in the air, and the place smelled of dust and mold. He could hear the pitter-patter of rain pouring down, and there was a peal of thunder accompanied by a burst of nearby lightning. In the brief second of light, Robin was able to assess some basics:

He was in a room, old and run down. A thin layer of dust covered the floor, and there was a leg a few inches from his face, a leg sheathed in a violet boot.

"Starfire?"

"I am here, Robin." Her voice was soft. "Beast Boy has injured his head. He's bleeding."

"Give me some light, I have gauze." Robin pushed himself up on aching limbs and reached for his utility belt.

"I have already tried," said Starfire. "Tim—I can't use my starbolts. It is as though the power is blocked, or—"

"Not there?" The voice was Raven's. Robin turned to see it and flicked on his night vision. The sorceress moved down a narrow, broken staircase that appeared to lead up to the second floor. Her motion was odd and bobbing, and it took Robin a second to realize what was off: Raven wasn't gliding—she was walking.

"Your powers are gone?" Robin said. With the problem of being able to see solved, he was able to quickly patch up Beast Boy's cut. The green Titan stirred slightly, muttering something about Negative Man and his stupid practical jokes.

Robin turned to the sorceress. "What happened?"

Raven approached in the darkness and sat down, legs crossed, in front of him. Her cloak was gone entirely, which worried Robin. It was a physical manifestation of her power, an extension of the soul-self she used to manipulate objects and power her magic. If she didn't have that—

"I don't know yet," said Raven. "I can still feel all of you. I can still feel arcane energies around us, but there's something different. The flavor of the magic is wrong."

"We need to do recon." Robin motioned towards Beast Boy. "If your empathy powers are still working, then you can still heal Beast Boy, right?"

"Probably." Raven cradled the green Titan's head in her lap and moved her hand over the bandaged wound. "Azarath Metrion Zinthos," she whispered. There was a faint, white glow, and Beast Boy stirred.

"Damn," he said, sitting up. "How long was I out?"

"We don't know. We've been shifted somehow." Robin motioned to the room. "Definitely through space, and maybe through time as well."

Outside, the rain came down by the bucket load. Cars moved through the streets, sloshing rain up on the sidewalks and spraying passersby. Not far from the ancient tenement where they'd woke up, a skeletal police precinct smoldered with days-old flames. A stone wall bore a pewter plaque: LAPD Precinct 10.

"Los Angeles?" said Beast Boy. "How did we get here?"

Starfire crossed her arms, hugging herself against the cold. "The last thing I remember is that we were fighting Warp."

Robin closed his eyes, tried to remember. Warp. That's right—the time-travelling villain had appeared at Wayne Enterprises in Jump the day before the unveiling of the new WayneTech Crimeputer. Bruce had meant to donate it to the JCPD, but apparently Warp had other things in mind for it. Robin didn't know what a man from the 22nd century needed with a 21st century computer—nor did he remember how the fight had ended. If it ended—with time travel involved, the fight might still be going on at that very moment in a parallel plane of existence, or frozen mid punch with the Titans now trapped in the space between instants.

Stranger things—much stranger things—had happened to them.

Down the next street, Star spied a storefront with the lights on and an open sign in the door. As they approached, they saw it was a small Japanese soup shop specializing in various flavors of Ramen. The man behind the counter, a bushy-haired Asian septuagenarian, greeted them with a bow and a _konichiwa_.

"I'm sorry to bother you," said Robin. "This is going to sound insane, but what is today's date?"

"Today is the twelfth of October, boy wonder. Could I interest you in some fine Tokyo Tornado? Or perhaps the Kyoto Accord? Very spicy, very hot, just like global warming!"

"What year is it?" Raven said, her tone more of a command than a question.

"Year?" the man looked puzzled. He walked back behind the counter, brought forward a tulips-of-many-colors calendar and pointed to the front. White digits against the green read: 20XX.

"It is the Year of our Lord Twenty-XX," he said with a big smile. He took calendar into the back, then returned grabbing four bowls in order to make soup. The Titans traded glances. There seemed to be an empathic pulse from Raven: _don't make a Megaman reference_—though it might have just been Robin's imagination.

"We don't have any money," Robin called to the shopkeeper.

"Ah, nonsense." The shopkeeper continued making the soup. "In times like these, people have to take care of each other. Besides, I haven't sold any soup in days. I'm probably going to put it all in a truck and take it over to the hospital in the morning. Fill my little German car with as much gas as it will hold and drive until it runs out. My name is Frank Watanabe by the way."

_Times like these_? Robin almost asked, and when Beast Boy opened his mouth to do so, Robin raised a hand to stop him. With no explanation forthcoming, it would be something obvious, something everyone would know. Not knowing would draw attention. Whatever the times entailed, Robin bet it had something to do with the burnt-out police office across the street. Once four bowls of hot Ramen appeared before them, Starfire gulped it all down quickly. Robin ate fast as well, not realizing how hungry he had been. Beast Boy played with the food for a while, making sure it wasn't full of meat.

"So, what convention are you in town for?" Frank sat down at the table across from them and sipped a soda.

"Convention?" Raven said. "We're not actually in town for a convention."

"Ohhh, I see. So, who are you dressed as? I know you, Boy Wonder. I'm not familiar with the costumes of your lady friends or the green fellow."

Robin arched an eyebrow.

"Costumes?" Starfire said. "We are not dressed as anybody. We are ourselves."

"Ha!" Frank gave a huge belly laugh. "You kids these days. Taking _Kospurei _so seriously!"

Robin took a sip from his bowl, letting the spicy flavor calm his nerves. _Kospurei_? He thought they were cosplayers?

Frank looked at Starfire. "So, I can see from the way you two look at each other that you must be Mrs. Dick Grayson—"

A torrent of Kyoto Accord broth spewed out of Robin's mouth and into Starfire's face, even as his lover's eyes shot wide. The stinging spices of the soup caused Starfire to recoil. She let out a short, high squeal—and then there was a flash of green. Two beams lanced out of her eyes and burned holes in a ceiling panel.

Robin looked over at Frank, whose mouth was agape.

"Holy shit!"

"Dick Grayson?" Robin said, whirling to face the old man. "How do you know that name?"

Frank looked confused. "I read comics, I mean, I did as a child. How did she do that?"

"Read comics?" Robin tried to make sense of it in a way that didn't sound like something Gauntlet would say, but couldn't. They weren't in the future—they were in another world. A world where Robin—maybe all superheroes—existed only as fiction. He made a gesture of apology towards the bewildered shopkeeper. "I'm sorry. We—we aren't who you think we are."

Frank stared at Starfire, who was still trying to clean the last of the pepper from her eyes.

"Is she an _alien?_" Frank gasped. "Was she involved in the disappearances? Did she take my grandchildren?"

The elderly man lunged forward, the knife in his hand suddenly seeming a good deal less innocuous. Robin leapt up before anyone else could react, blocked the knife-arm with his gauntlets and twisted the shopkeeper into a tight hold.

"Listen to me!" Robin growled. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. I don't know anything about these disappearances. But if we can find your grandchildren, we will. I promise. You need to tell us what happened."

* * *

Seventeen months. It had been almost a year and a half since the disappearances, since millions of adults all over the world had vanished—along with nearly every child under twelve. Billions of people, then. Gone in an instant. Cars unattended, planes without pilots… chaos had ensued. Now, all that seemed to be holding society together was a person, a single man who the world now appeared to be rallying around—someone called Nicolae Carpathia. He was the Secretary General of what was now called the Global Community, formerly the U.N.

"The nature of these disappearances sounds uncomfortably familiar," said Raven. "You said all the adults who vanished were Christians."

Frank gave a nod mixed with a shrug of non-commitment. "I guess. Lots were, but not all Christians vanished. My younger brother converted to Catholicism before we even left Japan, forty years ago. But he's still here on this Earth, assuming he hasn't killed himself. I haven't talked to him in weeks. So like I said, there's no discernible pattern to this. It's all nonsense. And then you—kids dressed like comic book heroes with superpowers. What was I supposed to think?"

Frank's wiped the tear-dampness from his face.

"But the Christians that vanished," Raven said. "Would it be reasonable to say they were predominantly from certain denominations—Evangelical Protestants, particularly fundamentalist groups?"

"God, Raven." Beast Boy moved closer to her. "Don't even go there. You're not saying you believe in the Rapture."

"Considering we personally know a boy from the thirtieth century?" Raven stared through him. "No, I don't."

"Rapture?" said Frank. "I think I know what you're talking about. Man named Preacher Billings made a video that got leaked on to the internet. All over Youtube before it got taken down as 'Hate Speech'. One of those look-like-they-oughta-be-on-TV types that want to bludgeon you over the head with their religion. Some said it was a hoax, that it was made after the disappearances, but a lot of people believed it."

Though the look on Frank's face failed to stay angry for long.

"I guess any explanation seems reasonable these days."

Robin stroked his chin. "So, we're not the only ones who have noticed how similar this event is to dispensationalist Christian eschatology."

"You too, Tim?" Beast Boy gave an exasperated sigh. "Look, I know you keep your own beliefs close to the vest, but you're a smart guy. You have to know all the ways they twist and turn the scriptures to support the Rapture theory."

"Gar," Tim said sternly. "We _know_. Nobody is saying that this was actually the Rapture. Hear us out."

"I am actually not in The Know," said Starfire. "But I am not sure that I want to be."

"The sort of power it would take to instantly vanish a third of the human race, Robin—" Raven closed her eyes, reaching out with her senses. Her body was adjusting, growing accustomed to the different tenor of the supernatural power in this world, but it wasn't there yet. "Something like that could also wreak havoc on the planet. Cause the earthquakes and disasters described by John of Patmos, turn the seas to blood, and blot out the sky."

"You're saying something set up a fake Rapture?" Beast Boy grimaced. "Why would they do that? What do they gain from it?"

Raven glared at him. "I can't know that, but depending on what did it—it could be anything. Slave labor, experiments, soldiers—food."

Beast Boy turned greener.

"Then what should we do?" asked Starfire. "We must free the people stolen from the planet, we have to—"

"First things first," said Robin. "We have to get our bearings in this world. Not only do superheroes apparently not exist, but some of us are known fictional characters here. We need intell, and we need new clothes."

**0000**

Not far from Frank Wantanabe's shop, the four Titans found an old looted clothing store, windows smashed and shop abandoned. Few scant articles of clothing remained, but the Titans were able to cover their outfits. Raven mustered enough power—drawing from the many runes embroidered on her cloak—to shift it into her soul-self, then traded her unitard for a frilly violet shirt and jeans half a size too tight.

Robin opted to wear his white button-up and loose jeans over his armored tights and vest, but traded his mask for a pair of sunglasses.

"What are we going to do about my orange skin and Beast Boy's green everything?" said Star, emerging from a dressing room in a yellow sundress.

"We'll tell them your skin is a spray-on tan," Robin said. "As for Gar, I have a pair of holo-rings."

Robin removed two of them from his utility belt—thankfully a more muted goldenrod instead of the bright yellow one he often wore—and gave them to Beast Boy. Gar pressed them together, but there were two sparks of light and then smoke belched from the two rings. Beast Boy flung them off his hands.

"Hot hot! Ouch, damn it."

"Did the warp-displacement short them out?" said Raven.

"None of my other electronics are disabled," Robin said. He examined his communicator. "I don't have bars here, presumably because Starr Telecom doesn't exist on this Earth. But the internals are working okay. I'm setting it to hack the nearest available com system."

"The rings likely malfunctioned the same reason that our science powers don't work," said Star. "The laws of the physics themselves may be so different that the quantum differential values of the rings do not hold up. Michael Holt's quantum physics work has demonstrated that the vast majority of superpowers would function badly, if at all, if string-theory equations solved differently."

Beast Boy's eyes were saucers. "Sometimes I forget you're really smart," he said. "Hey, Robin's smart, you're smart, Raven's smart, Cyborg's smart—why do I have to be the one with the short straw here?"

Robin grimaced. Their powers and gadgets were on the fritz, and they were deep in the middle of some scary operation by a powerful force of unknown origin and motive.

And superheroes in general didn't exist. He eyed Beast Boy.

"Put on a hoodie and tell them you have a skin condition if they get a close look. Mr. Wantabe said that the official government explanation was some sort of radioactive feedback from the planet's nuclear weapon stockpiles. If the general public is swallowing something that preposterous then there must be some sort of psychic interference controlling their credulity."

"I think I understood most of that," said Beast Boy, pulling a gray UCLA sweatshirt from a rack. It was stained across the front with long-dried ink from an anti-theft device, but otherwise serviceable. "Bad mind mojo making people believe bogus crap."

"On a global scale," said Raven. "Meaning a massive arcane or technological operation—or a being of incomprehensible power."

Starfire hovered to the door. "Where shall we go now?"

"Somewhere I can get WiFi access," Robin said. "There will probably be coffee shops or hotels still carrying service closer to the inner city. With Raven's powers dampened, we're going to need help getting home."

"Lead the way," Beast Boy said. "You can't even know how much I hate this universe."

* * *

Two thousand miles away, a glass of gin and tonic fell from a desk, the noise of its shattering against the hardwood floor startling awake the room's sole occupant. Noel Alexander Collins sat up in his chair, fighting back the headache that his hangover brought with it. It was nearly one in the morning. The incredible load of paperwork that had come through his office since the Global Community had begun replacing the currencies of the world with its new proprietary dollar was, without a doubt, the most mind-numbing repetitive task he'd ever had to do. CollinsCorp, formerly one of the premiere tech suppliers to the United States armed forces, had faced plummeting stock prices since the announcement of the global disarmament. The Republican in him—the right-wing, cut throat business mogul that his father had instilled in him—despised every last moment of this. More government interference on a massive, completely unnecessary scale. And now every government in the world was getting in on it, not just Uncle Sam.

Uncle Sam had been taken out back and shot.

The liberal in him—the softer, hippy, 'marriage is not an iron clad contract' side, instilled by his mother—hated it too. The violations of civil liberties—his own, those of his employees and of every God-forsaken human being who didn't welcome their new Romanian overlord. It pissed him off something fierce.

Lady Liberty had been cut down where she stood, bidding welcome to the weary.

But more than anything else, the Global Community scared him. It terrified him. A one-world government, taking for itself all the military and political power of the planet, without one word of resistance from the masses. The President—that jackass Blue Dog Fitzhugh, never raised a word of public protest. It was uncanny, unreal, un_natural. _

Noel sat up picking up his bottle for a drink, then thinking better of it. The world was going to hell, it seemed. "Mother, I wish you were alive," he whispered to the photo on his desk. "I wish I had some sort of guidance."

Maxwell, his father, the bastard could not help. Simultaneously braver and more cowardly than Noel himself, had declared Los Angeles a no-Global Community zone. That zone quickly shrank to the eight blocks of Los Angeles surrounding the West Coast Collins Corp building when Carpathia's humvees rolled in, but it still turned his stomach. A totalitarian Maxwell-controlled state was bad enough. Maxwell wasn't stupid enough to oppress anyone—the GC was giving them enough oppression. But his 'freedom' came at too great a cost. Thousands died in his little war. Los Angeles—Noel's childhood home—was torn to shreds.

He took a brief sip of his spirits and then stuffed the bottle into the bottom desk drawer.

"Enough of that," he whispered. Noel opened the top file on his stack, skimming through it. It was a work order sent in from Carpathia's office.

Noel scanned it, and then reread it to confirm he'd seen what he thought he'd seen. The automobile of one Captain Rayford Steele was to be given an overhaul—armor plating, unbreakable glass, and the CollinsCorp proprietary fuel efficiency system. For an airplane pilot?

"Oh," said Noel. "My god, he's the pilot of GC-1. He flies Carpathia's plane. No wonder he has such high clearance."

The name sounded familiar, too—which was odd, because it was an unusual name. Old fashioned, almost like the alias of a 70s porn star.

_Steele. _A memory sparked.

"Oh. What? What the _hell_?" Noel pulled his tablet computer from the top drawer and skimmed through his files. Noel's middle name, Alexander, came from a famous man with that name, a man who died hundreds of years Before Christ. Some called that Alexander 'Great'. Noel had no intentions of dying of fever in the palace of a dead king, but he still studied the art of war from time to time. If war with the GC came—if it proved inevitable—he'd been keeping tabs of assets.

Rayford Steele was one of the assets—he was the member of a church outside Chicago where the preacher, a Bruce Barnes, was among the fundamentalists who believed that the Vanishings were part of the predicted Christian Rapture. He'd even attended—incognito—a church service where Barnes all but identified Carpathia as the Antichrist. So what in heaven, hell, or the Earth between was Carpathia _doing_ with such a man as his pilot. Rayford Steele, Christian, pilot of the Antichrist. It made perfect sense on one level, if Steele were suicidal inclined. But from Carpathia's point of view?

Unless he knew something Noel didn't, Carpathia was tempting fate.

Noel thought, deviously—Maxwellesquely—that he might give fate a little nudge.

CollinsCorp had developed plenty of toxins in their day, for various uses both industrial and military. If his father had disclosed all of their dealings to the government, CollinsCorp might have been dismantled, its researches prosecuted for crimes against humanity years ago.

One toxin, created by the brilliant, deceased chemist Richard Lorre, had an interesting effect of targeting the ethical reasoning and critical thinking centers of the brain. If Noel could get that into Rayford Steele's system, maybe combine it with a depressant…

No. God, no. What was he thinking? That was Maxwell talking. His mother—his mother wouldn't approve. But Carpathia had to go. There was nothing else to it.

He just had to figure out how.

* * *

Chloe Steele—no, Chloe Williams—turned over in bed, her hands instinctively moving down to her hips, to her groin. She ached dully, though a pleasant warmth fluttered around it the pain. There was blood on the sheets and sticking to her legs. So, that was it, then. The real thing—sex. Hymen popped, virginity lost. Welcome to nuptial bliss.

Her husband snorted loudly and turned over, draping his arm across her shoulders. Her brain buzzed with all sorts of thoughts: what happened now? Would they grow apart? Would Buck, ten years her senior, grow to think of her as a kid? He said that despite not being saved until after the Rapture, he was still a virgin—that his career as a journalist had taken precedence over romance. But then, was that even true? How could you tell? Chloe didn't think—didn't want to think—that Buck would lie to her, not now, after they'd been through nearly a year and a half of the Great Tribulation, now that they'd said their vows….

Chloe got out of bed and sauntered gently into the bathroom. She pulled off her cozy sports bra and stepped into the shower, washing herself down with the warm water, letting it embrace her like Buck's knobby arms did in the night. It was a minute or two more until the door swung open and Buck stepped in. The dorky bowtie he'd left around his neck through their lovemaking was now discarded as well, and Buck stepped into the shower with his wife, embracing her from behind, hands cupping her breasts.

"Well," he said, kneading with this fingertips, "I think that was the second best night of my life."

Chloe glared back at Buck. "Second best? What's the first?"

"My first night on staff at the Global Weekly," he said, lip twisting up in a grin.

"Oh yeah," said Chloe, feigning mock hurt. "That's really what a woman wants to hear the morning after her wedding night."

"Calm down, Chlo. Just joking with you. You don't need to be so sensitive."

After their shower, Chloe got dressed and slipped into the living room of her and Buck's massive New York penthouse. Seeing the view sent a strange wave of thrill and guilt down her spine. Buck's new job as the Global Weekly's head honcho—a position given to him by the Antichrist himself—seemed like too much of a coincidence. Chloe believed that God wanted him to take the position, but now that he had it, what did He want Buck to DO with it? So far, the only thing that had changed was Buck's new nearly-unlimited line of credit, which had got them this place. Chloe had used the card occasionally, usually for basic necessities, evangelistic purposes, and once just to withdraw a stack of cash and hand it out to people destitute from the loss of their children or Christian loved ones. Even that had raised Buck's eyebrow.

'Don't do that too often' he said. 'People will get suspicious.'

Feh, to suspicion, Chloe thought now. Buck could be remarkably unobservant in his personal life for an award winning journalist. She could start organizing, creating networks to protect the underprivileged—particularly those persecuted by Nicolae in the coming years—from famine and disaster. She'd have to read up on web security, on making her presence undetectable even to the Lord of Evil.

Hell, with that as her baseline competency requirements, there's no way Buck would figure out what she was doing. But where to learn?

"Chloe?" Buck stepped out of their bedroom buttoning up his shirt. "Admiring your own handiwork?"

He motioned to the decorations Chloe had done to the apartment. It wasn't much—or at least it hadn't felt like it. Just a rhythmic, soothing coping mechanism, almost mechanical in how detached she had been from the process. Something to quell the anxiety of the coming Horsemen of the Apocalypse while they awaited Bruce Barnes to return and give them some direction and strategy.

"Actually, just musing about what our next step is. There are so many souls to save and so many lives at stake. How do you process it all?" Chloe stared into Buck's eyes, but found them unreadable.

"I try not to," he said after a moment. "I take it one day at a time. Chaim and Nicolae are both furious at me for giving the two Prophets at the Wailing Wall screen time."

"Men with magical powers isn't newsworthy," Chloe said caustically.

"Not in Carpathia's America," Buck said. "I guess when you can borrow some of Satan's evil mojo, Moses and Elijah breathing fire seems passé."

Just then, the phone rang, a shrill piercing noise that made Chloe wish regular cell service would return to pre-Rapture levels. The phone tag they'd had to play via answering machines and secretaries made her feel like she was caught up in an episode of Mad Men. And poor Loretta back at New Hope, she'd lived through the _actual_ 60s.

Buck stopped after a brief conversation and hung the phone back up. "That was Plank," he said. "Apparently magical powers are newsworthy now. There was incident in LA last night with supposed security footage of a flying woman and—no joke—Robin the Boy Wonder."

Chloe stared at Buck, trying to wait for a smile to crack or a chuckle to give him away. But none came.

"Do they really need you to cover that? Why can't a local reporter do the job?"

"The footage has already gone viral, Chlo." Buck pulled on his coat. "I'm supposed to debunk it. People trust me."

"I can't imagine why," Chloe said.

Buck shrugged. "Can you imagine this face lying to anyone?"

"No," Chloe said. As soon as the door slammed shut, she added: "And that's what I'm afraid of."


	2. The Late, Great Planet Irked

**Chapter Two**

**The Late Great Planet Irked**

The flight from New York to Los Angeles was delayed for three hours, a fact that upset Buck more than it really should have. It was good, he thought, to actually do some real journalism. He couldn't the last time he could recall doing any, now that he thought of it. Ever since the Rapture, he'd been bounced from coast to coast, country to country, covering and studiously avoiding covering anything his new boss—The Global Potentate and prime Antichrist suspect Nicolae Carpathia. He'd certainly gained from his position: A-2 level clearance, an unlimited credit card, and an excuse to travel anywhere in the world. Part of him thought he ought to be giving more back—not to Carpathia but to the real Potentate of the cosmos that had led him to this job.

Waiting for the plane just so he could wait another seven hours as he crossed the skyways just left him antsy and impatient. When he emerged from the terminal at LAX, he quickly scanned the crowds waiting, and holding signs. Nobody from the Global Community Weekly there, he thought, pushing and dodging his way through crowds and eventually merging outside. A local GCW news van idled by the curb. Not exactly the most lush accommodations, but it would do.

He opened the passenger side door of the van and started to push himself inside, suitcase in tow, when he was stopped by a loud shout of surprise and the presence of a body. The driver's seat was occupied as expected, but the passenger seat was also full: a young woman with a laptop open in her lap, plinking away at the keys.

"Oh, excuse me," he said, backing away.

"Cameron Williams?" the man in the driver's seat said. "Is that you?"

He was a wiry bronze-skinned boy in his early twenties, wearing a shiny new press badge. The woman was a bit older, a bit paler, and had multiple piercings in both ears as well as another in her nose.

"Tanya Devers," the woman said. Buck saw the flash of yet another piercing on her tongue. "Society and Entertainment reporter for the LA Global Weekly office."

"Global _Community_ Weekly," the young man corrected.

"I'll call Nicky Alpine Ski Lodge's little alliance whatever the fuck I want," she said. "Maybe he can buy the business, but he can't buy me."

"Am I supposed to ride in a different vehicle," Buck said, trying to get the conversation back on track.

"Just get in the back," Tanya said. "Sorry we couldn't get a better ride for the Potentate's man."

"I'm nobody's man," Buck said. "Well, nobody but my wife." He opened the door and slipped into the seat by the audio-video console.

"Regardless, Plank specifically told us to get you a limo. Unfortunately it seems the only limo service we have an account with is booked all over with celebrities in town for some awards show."

"Splurging all over the place," Tanya said, chuckling bitterly and flashing the tongue piercing again. It made Buck cringe. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow the world could blow the shit up."

"I heard Robert Downey Jr. locked himself in his basement and started tinkering with a box of scrap," Johnny said. "Like he thinks he's actually Tony Stark."

"I think we've all gone a little crazy since every kid on the planet went poof." Tanya sighed. "You mind if I smoke?"

Buck realized the question was directed at him. "Go ahead," he said, though tried to project a little hostility. Apparently Tanya didn't get the hint; she lit a cigarette and puffed it as they wound through the streets of LA. Normally navigation was difficult because of traffic, but there was little traffic now—just abandoned cars, shot-up cars, blown up cars, burnt out cars. The smog had cleared up so much compared to Buck's last visit that much of the skyline was visible, including the CollinsCorp Tower in down town Los Angeles, where the shimmering field of light separated the United North American States from the eight blocks of Maxwell Collins' 'protectorate' from the GC. Buck had heard rumors through the press grapevine that Maxwell was spreading propaganda about Carpathia, about his upbringing in Romania, suggesting that his fathers practiced Satanism and that Carpathia was a devil worshiper.

Buck had asked about looking into it, but every time Steve Plank had pressed his lips together into a thin slit and told him that they were not to dignify such mendacities with an effort to debunk. They compared it to the racist 'birther conspiracy' stories about the former US President Obama, and Buck agreed the idea that something so damning could not be covered up for so long or when Nicolae had gone so far. But then, if anyone could do it would be the future incarnation of the Devil himself.

"You have any thoughts on Collins' claims about Carpathia?" Buck ventured, cracking his window to vent the smoke.

"He was raised by gay Satanists or whatever?" Johnny said. "Sounds like the best the right wing nutjobs could come up with since he's not black."

"I don't care where Potentate Appalachia came from." Tanya took a drag from her cigarette. "His parents could be albino cyborgs from Romulus for all I care. Nobody consolidates so much power to himself unless he's up to no good."

"You're going to get in trouble if you don't keep your mouth shut," said Johnny. "Free speech has limits, especially when the whole world is a crowded theatre."

"Whatever. I'm not afraid to go to prison. Hell, I'm not even afraid to die. Not that I want to, but my sins are covered by the blood and my fridge is full of Vodka. Until either changes, I'm going to dig up the fuckin' truth whether it's politically correct or not."

Buck's eyes narrowed and he wondered if this was all some sort of elaborate game. Buck's faith wasn't a matter of public record, but with the Antichrist boning Hattie Durham, the very woman that had introduced him to his wife, suspicion was certain and any talk of dissent might simply be a trap. Surely the foul-mouthed, substance-abusing punk in the front seat wasn't a real, true Christian. Buck didn't speak up, simply waiting and watching.

"You and your religions," Johnny sighed. Buck could not help but notice the plural.

"Vodka's not a religion," Tanya protested. "It's a relationship."

Buck felt a surge of anger at the mockery and forced himself to turn around. He checked his phone and noticed a text from Chloe.

**Buck. Donna went to pick up Bruce at airport w/ Loretta. Caught some bug on trip, now at hospital. Pray 4 him. –Chlo**

Well that was great—his pastor and spiritual mentor was ill, possibly with some ungodly jungle virus, and here he was doing a stupid fluff piece on flying aliens. He texted back _will do_ and returned his attention to the front. The van pulled up to the side of a ramen shop and the three of them piled out. Johnny got a camera from the back door and took it inside while Buck combed his hair and tried to look presentable. He wasn't used to broadcast journalism or to fluff pieces. He liked hard news with a bold, thick headline in a sans-serif font. He liked the 'by Cameron Williams' below it in Times New Roman.

Now he was covering fake space aliens. He half expected to watch a repeat of the broadcast later and find everything they said subtitled in Papyrus. He entered the noodle shop, where a small Asian man stood behind the counter, staring at the proceedings with a forced grin. Aids and technicians scuttled about the tiny shop, rigging up wires and pullies. Four people stood in the far corner: one of them was dressed as, no joke, Robin Batman's sidekick. Another had prosthetic Spock ears applied and green face paint, while a third wore a tight black leotard and a blue cloak.

The 'star' of the piece, though, was a woman in purple and lavender, her midriff bared, miniskirt, thigh-high boots, and every last inch of her exposed skin was painted orange. She also had a long blood-red wig on; she looked more like a cartoon character than an alien. There was a wiry man with an inscrutable accent started barking orders to the crew, and finally the cast ran into place.

Buck was shushed silent when he started to ask what was happening. The director shouted, "Action!"

The actors exchanged some meaningless babble while the shop keeper brought them their soup; the Robin actor shot up in mimed alarm, and then the pulleys lifted the alien up out of her seat. Green lights flashed, and finally the director shouted CUT. His accent was bizarre and inscrutable, and he approached the alien-actress in a huff.

"Why are you doing this to me?" he said. "You forgot your lines again, Lisa. Can't you see, you're tearing me apart, Lisa!"

The woman in the cloak grabbed the director by the shoulder and pushed him aside. "Shut up, Tommy. This is a stupid job, you prima-donna little fuck."

At this point, Tanya rolled her eyes and pushed buck aside, stomping forward to address the director. "If you're done with this recreation I'd like to do the interview now."

Buck and Tanya split off, Buck and Johnny talking to the shop owner and the actress playing the alien while Tanya took the director's camera operator to speak with the other three actors.

They started the interview introducing Buck Williams, and then he began talking to the man.

"And your name sir?"

"Ken Wantanabe," he said quickly. "Owner of this fine establishment."

Buck arched an eyebrow. "Ken?" he said. "I thought it was Frank. Funny you share the name with that Japanese actor."

The man laughed uncomfortably. "Well, yes. My name is actually Frankfort Kentucky Wantanabe," he said. "But most people just call me Ken. My parents were very eccentric!"

Buck could see Johnny face-palming behind the camera, so he decided not to press the name question. Something about Johnny felt off.

"And why did you and your, uh—" Buck motioned at the orange woman.

"Granddaughter," she supplied. "Lisa Nguyen."

"You and your granddaughter decide to do this?" Buck finished.

Though something nagged at him. Nguyen was a Vietnamese name, though this was a Japanese restaurant and Frank Wantanbe was supposedly a Japanese man. Perhaps it was her married name, he thought. Though she was not wearing a ring. Father's name?

"Well, it's easy to see, isn't it?" Frank said. "Business hasn't been so good ever since Maxwell Collins brought a war to LA. But when Lisa here came to me and wanted to shoot something for film school, I said, why not? Free publicity, right?"

"Has business picked up since the video went viral?"

"Unfortunately no, I can't say that it has. Hopefully this interview will change that."

"Well," Buck said, flashing a smile at the camera. "Why don't you count me as your first customer? I'd like a bowl of the Kyoto Accord."

Frank's face transformed, an uncharacteristic pallor draining his color and a frown forming on his face for the first time.

"Well, I don't think I can do that today," Frank said. "All my equipment is turned off, you see? It would take quite a while to start it back up."

Buck glanced from Frank, to Lisa, to Johnny; Frank looked relieved. Lisa looked disinterested. Johnny, though, was red-faced livid—and appeared to be directing his ire at Buck. Buck's first reaction was to be offended: Buck had always been a print journalist and had little experience interviewing people in front of a camera. Maybe in some parallel universe he could have been the anchor for GNN News Tonight, but for now Johnny had to work with what he had.

But then, Buck started to wonder: was Johnny expecting Buck to follow a different script? Had Buck asked the wrong questions?

Shortly after the interview concluded, Buck saw Tanya head outside, clutching a lighter. He followed her outside to talk: she may have been abrasive and blasphemous, but something about Johnny made him uncomfortable.

"Johnny sure is high-strung," Buck said.

"That he is," Tanya replied. She offered a cigarette. "Smoke?"

"No thanks. Coffee's my drug of choice." Buck yawned. "Could use some now actually."

"Too bad," Tanya said. "Starbucks was hit during the fighting. Fine Columbian slush for six blocks."

Buck cringed at the thought of drinking motor-oil laced coffee.

"Something isn't right here," Buck said after a moment. "I don't think they made the video that went on Youtube at all. I don't think that man in there has ever tasted Ramen, let alone sold it for a living."

"Interesting theory," Tanya said. "The other actors didn't exactly inspire me with confidence. They said they were characters from comic books, but only the one dressed like Robin seemed to know their name."

Tanya took a long drag on her cigarette. "Fuck. I'm going to go do some extracurricular investigating. If we're expected to cover this shit up, I want to know what we're covering up."

Buck nodded and waited for her to be gone, then checked his phone again. Text from Chloe that Bruce's condition was worse than she'd thought. He'd have to stay at the hospital a bit longer. Buck silently prayed for healing. When he opened his eyes again, Lisa was moving by him, her red wig off revealing short black hair. She smelled of make-up and chewing gum, and had her phone pressed up to her right ear.

"Yeah. I know, hon. I'm done here. Pick me up behind the Seven-Eleven. I don't want to walk around covered in this orange gunk any longer than I have to."

Buck watched her as she rounded the corner at the edge of the block. Buck slipped through a back alley, being careful to tread quietly. Finally he pressed his back against the wall of one building when he heard Lisa's voice around the corner.

"Yeah. It's done. Not a lot, dear. Yeah. Three-fifty, plus I get to keep the costume—big whoop. Still, it's food on the table until I can get a real job in this hell hole. You'd think with a third of the world's population just up and vanishing that it wouldn't be hard to find a job, but then that pig-fucking Romanian went and ruined the economy with his stupid one-world-everything nonsense."

After a moment, in which a female voice jabbered on the other end for a moment, Lisa snapped her phone shut.

Buck waited a moment and then rounded the corner.

"Excuse me," he said.

"—were you spying on me?" Lisa blurted. "God, is everyone in this town a total creep?"

"I just want to talk to you," Buck said. "Off the record."

"About what?" she demanded.

"You said you got paid to do this. By whom? Does that mean you've never been here before today?"

"You're going to get me in a lot of trouble," Lisa said. She moved towards the edge the alley, brushing by Buck. "And my fiancé is going to be here any minute and he's got a concealed carry-permit so—"

Buck gritted his teeth and grabbed Lisa by the arm, then shoved her back. His other hand latched onto her shoulder. Lisa screamed out.

"You're hurting my arm, asshole."

"I'm sorry, but this is important." he said. "Listen to me. I only want the truth. I was sent here by that Romanian pig-blanker to debunk the viral video. But if you're just an actor, if this debunking is bunk, that means there's something seriously worth looking into here."

"Look fine," she finally said. "I wasn't part of the original video. I just needed the money. I'm a stuntwoman, that's all. I don't know anything about a government cover up. Now let go of me before I kick you in the balls."

Buck let go and backed off. He felt guilty that he'd let the old nature get the best of him, but this was huge: if this stupid viral video scared Plank and Carpathia enough to extend their propaganda arm, then maybe there was something to it. But what? Angels? Space aliens? Did his theology even allow for that? Buck was skeptical of aliens even before he was saved, but seeing the clock of the world tick down like this had cemented his unbelief on that particular matter.

But who was to say? God made a big universe, why not other inhabited planets?

But then, if they were actual aliens… why were they parading around dressed as superheroes?

It didn't make a lick of sense to Buck, but for some reason, that made it all the more intriguing. He was so eager to get back and tell Tanya about what he'd found that he didn't see Johnny rounding the back of the van, camera in hand, until he was crashing into him.

Johnny swore over Buck's apology, but even that seemed inadequate an exchange of words when the camera hit the ground with a hard CLAT and bounced into the street. Buck started for it when a pick-up truck blazed by, swerving left to miss Buck and managing to crush the camera beneath its oversized tires.

Buck felt at least twelve different profanities forming on the tip of his tongue, and yet none of them seemed adequate.

"You fucking moron!" Johnny thundered behind him, picking himself off the ground. "You clumsy idiot. Do you know how much those cost?"

"Forget the cost of the camera," Buck said. "I can pay for it. What about the footage?"

Johnny paled. "If that footage is lost we'll have to shoot the interview again. I just hope the cloud sync was finished before you—"

"Williams!" The interrupting voice came from Tanya, who waved him over from the Ramen shop.

Johnny had already boarded the van and was desperately checking the computer to see if the footage had made it online. Buck took the opportunity to slip away and see what Tanya wanted.

"Boy howdy were you right," Tanya said. "That's an acceptable expression for you, right, scout? Not too R-Rated."

"Get on with it," Buck snapped.

"Touchy. Anyway, I looked in the back of the kitchen. There's nothing left here. All the food's been taken away. This sure as hell wasn't a publicity stunt. I found this in the walk-in cooler."

Tanya handed buck an eight-by-eleven sheet of paper, on which was scrawled a note:

**Any food you find here is food I have left for the hungry. I loaded all my truck could carry and took it to the hospital. Business is dead in this part of Los Angeles, and the specter of war worries me greatly. I may go back to Japan, if I can scrounge up the money. May you be blessed by whatever gods you believe in.**

**Sincerely**

**Franklin J. Wantanabe**

_**FRANK**_

It was dated the same day the video went viral, the day after the footage was captured by his security cam.

"Ho boy," Buck said. "This is rich. I guess it's a good thing I smashed Johnny's camera."

"You did _what?_" Tanya said, struggling to restrain a laugh.

"It was an accident." Buck glanced back at the van where he could hear Johnny arguing with someone over the phone.

"There are no accident's when it comes to the Global Community," Tanya said. "That was Providence. Fucking delicious Providence."

Buck frowned at the swear, but couldn't help but agree with the sentiment. After a moment, Johnny stomped out of the van. Tanya snatched the note from the real Frank out of his hand and shoved it in her pocket.

"Good news and bad news," he said. "We're not shooting the interview again."

"What's the bad news?" Buck said.

"That is the bad news you moron."

It was all Buck could do not to punch him.

"The good news is that a low-res version of the video was recoverable so this wasn't a total wash. I hate to be a pain, but Cameron Williams, you are not cut out for TV. You don't grill a man on a fluff piece."

"I asked him why he used his middle name and then offered to buy a bowl of noodles," Buck said. "If that's grilling him I'd love to see your idea of softball."

"Whatever," Johnny said. "I guess we're taking you back to your hotel. Because of your fuck-up they want you to write a companion piece to print in the Weekly."

"I didn't bring a computer," Buck said, grimacing. "I general handwrite stories and get a temp to type them up."

"Don't worry," Tanya said. "My wife is a huge nerd. Plenty of spare laptops you could borrow."

"Wife?" Buck said, glancing over at her.

"Yes, believe it or not, boisterous abrasive malcontents sometimes do tie themselves down to a spouse."

"It's just you said wife," Buck began.

"Yes. Female spouse. Old lady. Partner in Holy Matrimony? You have one too, don't you?" Tanya strapped herself in the passenger seat of the van as Buck sat in the back again.

Buck pressed his lips together. _Fantastic._ The one apparent ally he had against Carpathia in this town was a foul-mouthed lesbian who thought paying lip service to the divine was enough to cover up the abomination of her lifestyle choices. Still, an apparent ally was better than a clearly hostile GC brownnoser like Johnny.

"Who knew the great Cameron Williams was a homophobe," Johnny said at last. "Especially working alongside Verna Zee."

Buck goggled. Verna Zee was a lesbian? That wasn't possible. How could he have missed that? And if she was out enough for someone in LA to know then how did she even have a career?

"Knock it off," Tanya said. "Last thing I need is you coming to my rescue. If Buck doesn't want to borrow a laptop from me because of gay cooties then I guess we'll let him have yours."

Johnny scowled at Tanya. "Or he could just buy one with his Carpathia-One Gold Card."

"Spend the devil's money too freely and you end up doing the devil's work," Tanya said. "Michelle and me make our living honest: taking the devil's money to do the Lord's work."

"Homophobes behind me, seditionists to my right," Johnny said. "I should just move to New York to get away from all the crazies."

"Actually, I live in New York," Buck said. "I would be honor bound to print reams of libel about you if you moved there."

Johnny muttered something under his breath and kept on driving.

* * *

Raven sat on the roof of her hotel, a small cheap dive on the outskirts of town, meditating, reaching out with her empathic senses. She couldn't feel the powers and principalities—the enemy forces whatever they were—attacking and suppressing the critical thinking centers of the planet's brains. But she could feel the damage those forces had done, the touch of complacency and credulity that kept them from seeing through the magnanimous words of this Global Community and its leader.

Nicolae Carpathia. The name seemed foreign and familiar at the same time. His story was remarkable, more than anything, for how little sense it made. Born and raised in Romania, Carpathia had become the president of that country; he wooed the world with his widely-praised public speaking skills, and yet in the videos she'd watched, Carpathia was an awful speaker. His voice was soothing and laced with magic, but the words were ill-chosen, stilted, and gave no indication that Carpathia could measure the mood of his listeners. Though he fluently spoke many languages, he seemed to have mastered the art of rhetoric in none of them. Yet people gobbled up his words and ideas by the droves.

And then, he became the secretary general of the UN as though through magic, and used the powers granted to him from the panic of the Event to reorganize the whole world under U.N. governance. How was it that such a massive psychic suppression field could envelop the planet, yet not leave a trace?

She thought about Cyborg—maybe his computer systems could have detected something her magic couldn't. Or perhaps her lover, Noel, could have used his powers to interface directly with the minds of others and help her find the source. But Cyborg hadn't been brought with them to this dimension and Noel… poor Noel, manipulated by a wicked man and now committed to a mental hospital.

"Raven," crackled the voice of Robin through the communicator. "You're needed down here. You're going to want to see this."

Raven didn't acknowledge verbally, but sent Robin an empathic pulse of affirmation, then summoned her strength. She still wasn't up to reliably hovering, but she could subsume her body inside her Soul Self for long enough to phase down through the roof.

In the Titans' Room, Beast Boy looked up from the Gamestation he was playing and Starfire stopped her examination of the defective hologram rings.

Robin was hunched over a laptop managing numerous browser tabs, and, Raven suspected, hacking programs. The laptop they had found at an abandoned electronics store, way in the back in a safe that Starfire had made short work of—really they'd only been looking for money. Either way it pricked Robin's conscience to be a thief, even of abandoned belongings.

"What have you found?" Raven said.

"In this world," he said. "Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman—every trace of superheroes and metahumans really—don't exist. DC Comics in our world publishes fictionalized accounts of real heroes. In this world, Batman never existed—in fact, he and Superman have been continuously published since the thirties with a sort of sliding timeline like you'd see in a Spider-man comic."

"And Robin is also a fictional character," Raven ventured.

"Yes, but the weird thing is that _I'm_ _not._ None of us are, actually. Dick was Robin for decades, founded a team called Young Justice, became Nightwing… but after Jason Todd died, the Spoiler took up the mantle of Robin and that lasted for eight years or so until this new kid shows up named Damian."

"I bet he's totally evil," Beast Boy said. "Nobody names their kid Damian unless they're evil."

"It's the child of Batman and Talia al Ghul," Robin said non-committally. "Otherwise, Garfield Logan is a 28 year old man who lives off the royalties from his role on _SpaceQuest 2424_ as a teenager, Tim Drake owns a small software company in Jersey City, and Angela Roth is a Ph.D. from San Francisco who never had children. Nobody's ever heard of a Princess Koriand'r, and as far as I can tell, aliens have never visited this world."

Raven pondered this. Angela Roth was her mother's birth name, before she'd been the victim of a powerful demon. After that demon, Raven's father, had sired her, Angela had fled to a mystical city called Azarath and taken the name Arella. It occurred to Raven that if they, the Teen Titans, were fictional in this universe, then their absence—the void around which those they knew had rearranged themselves—may have been a sort of defense mechanism of the mulitverse. To prevent a paradox, they had been forcibly defictionalized, recontextualized to fit this new world. What that meant for the Titans future chances in this universe—for them home, Raven couldn't fathom.

"What about Terra and the others?" Raven said. "Cyborg? Gauntlet?"

She paused a moment.

"Savior?"

"Cyborg is on the Justice League in the comics, and Terra is on the Outsiders," said Robin. "Gauntlet is on Young Justice. And Savior…"

Robin switched to a different tab on his browser, then set the video thereon to full screen.

The man depicted was Noel—unmistakably, absolutely. Raven's heart flooded with a concoction of mixed emotions. The boyfriend, the partner who had been so cruelly taken away from her. He didn't have the white and blue costume, nor the physique, or the absurd shock of white hair, but the face and voice were unmistakably his. CEO, CollinsCorp Chicago.

"He runs _CollinsCorp?_" Raven spat. Only after it was out did she realize how full of disgust her voice was. His father, Maxwell, was like the human mirror of Raven's own demonic sire.

"His mother Crystal still died in the same way," Robin said. "He still ran and fled to New York. But the chemical trucks that caused his mutations weren't there. He was eventually found and taken home. If it makes you feel any better, his branch in Chicago has the support of every ethical standards bureau the LA branch doesn't. He's trying to change the company from within. And that got a lot easier after what Maxwell did."

Raven eyed Robin. She'd seen the CollinsCorp tower on their way to the hotel—saw the shimmering force field around it, but the logo was different and she was too far away to make out the writing. She'd wanted to believe—hoped—it was just a similar building in this parallel world.

She looked down at Robin. "What did Maxwell do?"

* * *

Maxwell Collins had no regrets. True, many had died in the fighting, a costly miscalculation. True, he was now public enemy number one outside the Bubble—that was what he called it, the barrier that separated him and his faithful from Carpathia's abominable global government. Maxwell had found that beneficence and mercy came easy to him—easy when it was a weapon to be used against the great and incomprehensible threat of that hypnotic Romanian bastard.

But mercy as a weapon? It could only be used on people that were at his mercy. To strike back at Carpathia, he'd need a new weapon, a different weapon. Bread and circuses could keep the masses in order, but it couldn't topple a king.

The video that now played itself on his computer screen, and on every huge screen throughout his office… that may have been the weapon he needed. Buck Williams, the tool Carpathia had put in charge of the Global Weekly, was on TV that very moment, showing how the viral video had been faked. And it was a lie. Maxwell knew Frank Wantanbe. One of the few people he might have called a friend if Maxwell were the type to indulge in such things; he knew Frank's voice, more to the point. Knew what he looked like. The actor on TV was not him.

His best experts had gone over the original security footage time and time again. They could find no manipulation. No explanation that covered every effect, ever technique used to produce such a video. The Global Community reproduction was remarkably close, identical even, to the naked eye. But not the same in the important details.

Maxwell had ruined downtown LA in a bid to keep Carpathia out of his business. The people who supported him, fought and died for him—they deserved better than to be trapped in a little bubble. They deserved champions, freedom fighters.

They deserved _heroes._


	3. There's a New World Coming

**Chapter Three**

**There's a New World Coming**

"Not if I can help it," whispered Nicolae Carpathia. He rolled over in bed, reached into the drawer of his night stand and pulled out a thin black phone. This world was his, damn it. There would be no new world. There would be no heroes on his planet. He dialed a number, being careful not to wake the slumbering Hattie Durham, his secretary and sexual conquest.

"_Mr. Carpathia?"_ the tinny voice of a spineless aid annoyed him, even as the subservience pleased him.

"Mr. Danvers, I need you to retrieve someone for me. Send me Suhail Akbar."

* * *

"We have a planet to liberate," said Robin. "If you have any other suggestions then I'd like to hear them."

"Well, I don't," said Beast Boy. "But I mean, come on! You want to accept help from Maxwell Collins? He's like the baddest dude you can be without being Hitler or Darkseid. Tell him, Rae. You know Maxwell better than anyone here."

Raven took a deep breath, and tried to measure her words. "Whatever his coded messages promised, you know that he is using us. We won't be his champions, but his tools. As soon as we're no longer useful, he'll toss us to the wolves."

"I'm aware of all that," said Robin. "But we can't fight this Global Community without hardware."

"Perhaps we should not fight this Community of the Globe," said Starfire, hovering just above the bed. "Our primary objective should be to get home rather than disrupt the timeline of a parallel universe."

"What she said!" Beast Boy added.

"It's not that simple," Robin said. "We don't know that this IS a parallel universe. What if something Warp did in that fight changed our universe? Or Warps powers simply shielded us from changes someone else made to the timeline."

Robin put his hand down on the desk. "Think about it. Noel exists, even though every other Teen Titan that isn't one of us four is fictional. That must be significant."

Starfire winced. Raven felt a pang of fear from her—she had thought of that possibility and retreated from it, most likely for what it might mean for her home planet Tamaran.

"Shall we take a vote?" Starfire said. "I say we seek Maxwell's help, even knowing the risk."

"Agreed," said Robin. "We know him. We know he can't be trusted. But we have an advantage: _he_ doesn't know _us_."

"Well I say we should find someone else with lots of money and technology," Beast Boy said. "And with Rae that makes us deadlocked, so fat lot of good voting did."

"Actually," said Raven. "I agree with Robin and Starfire. Maxwell is the lesser of two evils in this case. He will use us and he won't hesitate to kill us if we become an obstacle. But unlike him, we know exactly who we're dealing with."

"Of course," Beast Boy said, flopping back onto a bed. "We always gotta do things in the most risky way possible."

"If you didn't want danger you shouldn't have signed up to be a superhero," said Robin.

The discussion was interrupted by a knock at the door, a short series of pecks that had Beast Boy springing to his feet—or rather paws, as he was now a huge Doberman—while Starfire and Raven both summoned weakened versions of their respective energies to their hands.

Robin motioned for them to hold back and slipped over to the door, peaked through the glass, then opened it.

"Delivery for Timothy Drake?" the voice on the other side said. "Sign here please."

A moment later, Robin wheeled in a couple of heavy looking boxes on a hand truck.

"What's all that?" Beast Boy said.

"Makeup and other supplies for our disguises," Robin said. "If Maxwell thinks Starfire's actually an alien then she's liable to wind up on a dissection table."

"Or the slagged remains of one," Starfire said grimly.

"But we just voted to get Maxwell's help! You couldn't have known—"

"Better to have it and not need it," Robin said cutting open a box with the sharp blade of a batarang, "than to need it and not have it."

* * *

Buck plucked away on the keyboard of the laptop Tanya had loaned him, composing the propaganda fluff piece with the right amount of weasel words and mealy-mouthed clarifications to make his Wikipedia-editing pre-teen self weep in despair. As soon as he filled the minimum word count, he quickly emailed it to Tanya. He was exhausted and it was nearly 3AM—6AM by his internal clock, keyed to New York as it was. He didn't trust himself to proof-read or edit anything, and probably couldn't have remembered the GCW password anyway.

He crashed into his hotel bed without even removing his belt, let alone the rest of his duds.

He heard a snoring that he would, hours later, later realize was his own, just as a triplet of knocks rattled the door to his hotel room. Fearing a chainsaw killer or Carpathia hit-squad, he immediately checked the peep hole. On the other side stood a slightly tubby red-haired woman with heavy, sky-blue eye shadow. She stood on her tiptoes, Buck guessed, by the way she seemed to be leaning on the door.

"Mr. Williams? Is that you? Cameron Williams?"

"He likes to be called Buck," Tanya said derisively. As the other woman stepped back, Buck was able to see Tanya over her shoulder. "Buck, you gonna let us in? Or at least come out of hibernation?"

Buck frowned and opened the door, feeling a bit self-conscious about his body odor and scratching at his belly where his belt buckle had pressed into it.

"What time is it?" he said.

"Nearly eleven." Tanya popped her shoulders. "Buck, this is Michelle, Michelle, Buck. Glad we know each other."

Through the glass, Buck had perceived the other woman as young, maybe the same age as Chloe, but now he realized that she was older than that, closer to his and Tanya's age. Her outfit—Lord, her outfit—gave Buck a start. A black tube top covered little more than her breasts, and beneath that a fishnet undershirt. Her jeans were mismatched, with bright neon patches down one leg and various shades of blue denim down the other.

Buck extended Michelle a hand, tentatively, and she pumped it with both of hers.

"So what's going on?" Buck said.

"Well if nothing else, I want my computer back," Tanya said.

"_Our_ computer, honey." Michelle pushed past Buck and practically trotted across to the desk.

"Only by California law," said Tanya. "Unless you've picked up a love for violent macho action games that I don't know about."

"Tanya, I put a three terabyte harddrive in this thing. It's big enough for the both of us." Michelle scooped up the computer and its cables and stuffed it in a bag, then stomped back out into the hall.

"Did you get the article up?" Buck said, turning to Tanya.

"I did indeed." Tanya yawned and stretched her arms. "Now the question is, do you have any plans for the day?"

"You mean other than catching a flight back to New York to see my wife and run… what was you called it? The propaganda arm of the Global Community?"

"Something like that," Tanya said. "Or you could join me and _my_ wife and we could blow the crock of shit cover-up all to hell with some real reporting. Come on, you can't be getting cold feet here. You were the one who saw through the scam to begin with."

"I have a hard enough time getting stories about low-level Global Community corruption into print. I may be the boss, but I have to fight the Carpathia-faithful on every single story. I'm amazed that they occasionally actually print what I tell them to."

Buck sighed.

"How could I ever get something like this out the door of the _Weekly_ office?"

Michelle laughed.

"Print? This is the 21st Century. We don't need printers, or underlings. We have 5G mobile hotspots and proxy tunnels like pretzels, me and Tanya. There are entire corporations that went under after the Rapture because their markets no longer exist, with buildings full of servers sitting unused after their domain names expired. All you need is a little imagination and a crowbar to break into places."

Buck nodded dumbly, unable to think of a good counter point yet liking neither Michelle's lifestyle choices, nor her casual admission to breaking and entering. But more than that, he felt the throb of a bruised ego. He'd often thought of himself as tech savvy. He'd had an email address since he was thirteen and defragmented his parents' computer every other week. It grieved him that Michelle, though perhaps five years his junior, could talk circles around him on the matter of information technology.

"Okay, well," he said after a moment. "We'll need disguises. All the proxys in the world won't help if someone recognizes us and traces us back to our families."

Michelle nodded. "We'll scramble the voices in post, and I think Tanya has something to cover the rest."

Buck looked her way. She frowned, glared at Michelle, then rolled her eyes, swinging her shoulder bag around. She unzipped it and pulled out three white masks, the smiling pale face of Guy Fawkes.

"Remember, remember," she said dryly.

Buck tried to think of a way to make the poem work with the Fourteenth of October, but in his exhaustion, drew a blank.

* * *

"I feel like a potato that needs to be peeled," Beast Boy announced, stomping out of the restroom.

His arms, all the way up to his shoulders, and his face and neck, were covered in a pale Caucasian body paint. It had taken three layers to fully cover the green, and the red hair dye was botched, making the shapeshifter's hair a dull brown. Across the room, Starfire now had the appearance of an African American women, complete with fake eyebrows, while Raven had gone with an Indian look to complement the jewel placed at her Ajna chakra, bronzing her skin and dying her hair black. Robin, the only Titan present without an unusual skin color, didn't bother with make-up.

"You'll have to hold off on that," Robin said. "Now I don't have to tell any of you that Maxwell is treacherous. Do not let him or his staff touch you, spray you, or inject you with anything. Do not let your guard down, and do not reveal any more than you have to for this mission to work."

"Agreed," Raven said. "I'll do my best to maintain an empathic link between us, but check your emotions. With my powers dampened in this world, sudden panic might make me drop the link."

"Great," Beast Boy said. "Now how do we get Maxwell Collins' attention?"

"I managed to listen in on some Global Community communications traffic earlier," said Robin. "They're sending in a raiding party through an underground tunnel tonight. I may have tipped the security guards off about it, but I think we had better intervene to make sure nobody gets hurt."

"Seems like a strange place to say Titans Go," Beast Boy said sadly. "Not a heroic legacy to carry on in sight."

Robin put a hand towards the group. "Titans Together, then."

The Titans' performed a communal fist bump.

"Together Forever," said Starfire.

Robin didn't think Raven had started the empathic link yet, but he still swore he could feel her wince.

* * *

It was bonkers. Buck Williams, internationally famous journalist, publisher of the Global Community Weekly—the most widely read news magazine in the world—now found himself sneaking through the dark alleys of Los Angeles. This wasn't how journalism was _done_. This was more like… espionage.

Buck was all for espionage against the GC, but it wasn't _his_ thing. _His_ thing was informational sabotage—trying to keep his news mag from censoring negative news about Carpathia, for instance.

_This _was tricky. Buck didn't have the skills for it. And he didn't like that this carried the risk of being shot at.

He stared up at the bright moon, half blanketed in the darkness of space.

If the Rapture had any benefits for the Los Angelans Left Behind, it was the reduction in the size and density of the smog cloud that hovered over the city. But it came at a stark cost, even without the CollinsCorp tower and the two blocks around it in every direction being cut off and deemed a nation apart by one corporate fatcat. Abandoned cars, subsequently rendered scrap by the fighting, lined the streets, making vehicular travel impossible. But being out on foot, at night, in these abandoned streets, was conspicuous. Even the most judicious of routes could lead them into an encounter with a desperate, gun-toting junkie. Or worse.

Buck held his breath as the lesbians led him through a part of the city where fighting had been the most intense. The smell of gunpowder, sewage from burst lines, and worse was overwhelming. Tanya held up a hand and Michelle stopped dead. Buck didn't see anything, so he started to press on past, until Tanya grabbed him by the shoulder and jerked him back.

"Stay still," she whispered. "Look."

Buck followed the line of her finger out to a spot several blocks away. Figures, clad in Global Community blue, stood in the road in front of a gutted tanning salon. Despite the darkness, they had no flash lights. Night vision goggles, perhaps. A stealth mission. They opened up a utility panel and dropped down into it, one by one, until only one remand standing guard. Perhaps the electrical grid had a tunnel that would lead them all the way into Maxwell's basement. Or maybe it wasn't a utility at all, but an escape tunnel made to look line one. Buck had heard things—he didn't doubt that Maxwell would abandon the entire town

"Reese was right," said Michelle. "GC Troops."

She pulled out a small spyglass, and looked down it. "Got some heavy hardware too. Assault rifles and explosives."

"How is this related to the supposed flying woman?" said Buck.

"If there's anything weird going on in LA these days, it's probably coming from Collins Corp," Tanya reasoned aloud. She didn't sound too sure of herself, and that didn't boost Buck's confidence at all.

"And they're breaking into Collins Corp?" Michelle said. "That must be it. Shutting down his little rebellion would be great PR for Nicky Erebor."

"Nicky Erebor?" Buck said.

Tanya scowled. "Nerd joke. Forget it. Williams, you have high clearance. We may need it. But plan A is not to get caught."

"Caught doing what?" Michelle said. "You're not seriously suggesting we follow them."

"You damn well know I am," Tanya said. "Either we get into Collins' building and get the scoop on these superheroes, or we go home and waste more time while Carpathia brainwashes the rest of the planet."

"Keep your voices down, ladies," Buck said. He could see, now that Tanya had him looking in the right direction, that the remaining GC soldier had begun stalking towards them. He reached out his hand to Michelle.

"Spyglass."

She put it in his hand, and Buck brought it to his eye. The broken city looked surreal in the green night vision, and the preternatural light cast by the CollinsCorp force barrier made Buck wonder what sort of strange radiation it was bombarding the city with. Sure enough, though, the GC lookout was heading their way. Unlike the others, he was dressed as a standard security guard, and did not have any unusual headgear or weaponry.

"I think he heard you," Buck said.

"Shit," breathed Tanya. "We'll have to circle around—"

When she trailed off, Buck looked back towards the guard and was surprised to see him lying face down on the pavement, squirming as if he couldn't move. Buck thought he saw a glimpse of a human figure disappearing inot the same utility tunnel that the troops had stormed.

"I think we found our 'superheroes'," said Tanya. She pulled the Guy Fawkes mask down from inside the hood of her sweat shirt. Buck, grimacing, did the same. Michelle followed closely behind, lugging a large bag full of electronic equipment.

"What's in there?" Buck said. "Rocks?"

"My computer, high-powered transmitters, and a graphene fiberoptic cord. I'm going to venture a guess that regular 5G service doesn't get great reception down in the utility tunnels."

As the three passed the guard, Buck realized what the squirming was about: a steel cable was coiled tightly around the guard's body, preventing any movement. Though he grunted and groaned, his mouth seemed sealed shut somehow. Buck was tempted to do something—help him up, preach Jesus at him while he was a literally-captive audience—but Tanya and Michelle ignored him, and in light of the bound guard being aligned with the embodiment of evil, Buck decided it was best to follow suit.

They reached the entrance and waited by the tunnel for a few minutes, listening, when finally Tanya inhaled sharply and climbed down into the darkness. Buck and Michelle followed, and he handed Tanya the spyglass. Buck turned on his mic within his helmet while Michelle set up her transmitter, hooked the cable to it, and began manipulating the tablet screen.

"This is Guy Fawkes," Buck said. "Coming to you from downtown Los Angeles. What you are about to see is the truth—not the made up Global Community lies you see on TV."

Tanya tapped the button on her camera and began recording. Buck just hoped this all wasn't a wild goose chase—and even more, that it wasn't some sort of elaborate trap engineered by the Antichrist.

* * *

Suhail Akbar had never been a cautious man, but he had been careful, if that made any sense. He took care to please God. He took care to keep his body and mind pure and strong. He took care of his family. But caution was not a strong suit. How many times had he nearly been shot or detained by IDF forces as a teenager? Tossing rocks, usually. Small stuff. But occasionally, he'd just do something reckless: theft, vandalism, assault… not because he didn't care, but because he believed God was on his side. Because he believed the IDF was impotent as long as God was with him.

And then, Chaim Rosenwig came up with his discovery. That God would bless Israel with something that made them even MORE economically powerful seemed like a slap in the face, but then there was the attack. Russia and its allies, whose motivations were as esoteric as God's often seemed, tried to bomb Israel into submission, to demand that the miracle formula be theirs or nobody's.

And God _saved_ them. Saved Israel when he couldn't spare a thought to save the people of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, wouldn't intervene to stop six million Jewish deaths at the hands of Adolf Hitler. Or stopped the bombings that had claimed friends and neighbors, bombings performed by the very country in whose skies the miracle unfolded—after it had expanded, even, taking the West Bank and Gaza, gobbling up parts of Jordan.

Everything he thought he knew stopped making sense that day. Actually, it had stopped making sense long before that. It probably never made sense, this life. But the holy salvation of Israel that day had awoke him to that fact and sent him into a spiral of doubt and depression. He had sneaked his way into a Jewish wedding celebration that night and filled his belly with alcohol. The next morning, he awoke to a beguiling, perplexing feeling, the serenity of the damned.

If nothing made sense, then nothing was right or wrong. There was only power and pleasure. Akbar dedicated his life to pursuing both, and found it as hollow and empty as anything else he'd done in life. Except this was hollow, empty fun instead of hollow, empty drudgery.

And apparently, Carpathia, a living embodiment of Nordic perfection, decided that he, thug, security guard, violent, and according to Carpathia "brilliant" Suhail Akbar would lead the new Peacekeeper squadron on their first mission: eliminate Maxwell Collins, bring down his force field, and recover every last bit of data from his computers, anything that Carpathia could take and add to his own arsenal. It sounded like a good plan.

"We're approaching the defensive position," he said softly. "Cling to the walls."

Up ahead, bathed in the night-vision green, Akbar saw two figures standing idly, carelessly holding small weapons, perhaps single barrel shotguns. He actually felt a twinge of disappointment. It wouldn't be much of a fight.

The hallway abruptly narrowed about twenty meters before the guard station, though the ceiling was higher in that section. Akbar raised his gun—though gun was too small a word for this killing machine—and activated the alternative fire: two small anti-personnel rockets. He pressed his back to the wall, and manipulated the end of the gun to bend to the left. It couldn't fire bullets this way, but it let him target Collins' goons from the gun's built-in view screen without making himself a target.

He waited until the rockets each locked onto one guard a piece, then took a steadying breath. He squeezed the trigger, once, twice. The rockets flared to life and blazed towards the two guards, who immediately sprang into action with startled shouts. If they had any training, they forgot it, because they made no move to even call the attack in.

The rockets slammed into the barricades, a brilliant flash flooding the night-vision screen on the weapon. The sounds of wending metal and shattering glass accompanied the blast of the rockets. He gave the rest of the squad the order to open fire. Dozens of heavily silenced assault weapons lit up the corridor, and though he knew it was absurd, he could have sworn he saw a figure, a human figure moving in his peripheral vision, only appearing for a few brief instants of strobe lighting belching from the barrels of the rifles.

"Move ahead, keep shooting," Akbar called, hoping to reach the two hapless guards and either confirm the kills or finish them off before any more guards could respond.

As they neared the end of the corridor, Akbar saw that he'd made a miscalculation: a nearly-invisible sheet of reinforced glass stood between them and the guards, and that had taken the actual brunt of the rocket blasts. Both guards were still in one piece—mostly. The guard on the left began crawling away, and Akbar quickly put two quick shots through his arms, drawing cries of pain and ending his movement. Akbar was about to ask why half of his squad had stopped firing, but as he was turning his head, his eye caught something.

The other guard lay flat on his back.

Dead? Unconscious?

No. The barrel of his weapon was glowing. He was holding in the trigger—charging it up. But—

Akbar barely had time to react when the 'dead' guard sat up, aiming his weapon wildly. A beam of crackling white burst out of the barrel, Akbar slamming his back into a wall, even as the beam bore directly through the Peacekeeper to his right, the smell of charred flesh accompanied by a hiss and an ineffable gasp as the soldier collapsed.

Akbar wasted no time morning the dead as he raised his side arm and put two rounds through the guard's head.

Or at least, tried to. The bullets only grazed their target, cutting gashes into his cheek and forehead. Akbar's aim, even with his left hand, was better than that.

And then he noticed something else in his peripheral vision. The three Peacekeepers who had taken up the rear of the squad were gone—vanished into the darkness.

Akbar shouted to the Peacekeepers still standing.

"It's a trap!"

That was the last thing he got out before a world-rocking blow hit his jaw, slamming his head into the stone corridor wall. The strobe of his squad's rifles merged with the flash of his concussion. Only darkness followed.

* * *

"This Peacekeeper is dead, Blackbird," Robin said. "Get to the guards."

The Peacekeepers that he and the other Titans had stealthily waylaid lay in a pile several yards back. Raven flew passed the dead man as Robin administered some medication for the squad leader—to both take care of his concussion and keep him from waking up any time inconveniently soon.

By the time he was done, he looked up to see Raven kneeling over the guard who'd taken the brunt of the attack, whispering her mantra.

Her telekinetic powers were still not attuned to this universe, leaving her out of range to stop the first several volleys of bullets. When she finally got close enough, she was only able to slow and divert the two pistol shots—enough to limit the other man's wounds to facial lacerations, but not enough to stop the bullets altogether.

"Redbird, healing him is going to hurt me a lot more than normal. Both his arms are shattered and some glass is imbedded in his leg."

Robin nodded. "Share the pain with us if you have to."

Raven clenched her teeth placing her hands on the man's wounds. "Zinthos."

The word escaped her mouth as a hiss and the wounded guard seized up. Raven's eyes began to water, her muscles tightened beneath the bronze cosmetic make-up, and in the thinnest places sweat beaded on her forehead. Raven began to relax her muscles, but as she did Robin felt sharp pains, the agony of shattering bone, excruciating even though they were phantom. He felt retroactively guilty for every time he had asked Raven to heal himself or anyone else in the past.

As the empathic touch subsided, so did the pain, though the ache lingered.

"Empyrean, grab the heavier guard and carry him with us. I'll get the lighter one. Twilight, take point; Blackbird, cover the rear. It's another five hundred yards to the basement of the Tower, and we don't know what else might be waiting for us."

* * *

"That was unbelievable," Buck said, his face beaded with sweat inside the cheap plastic Guy Fawkes mask. There were other words coming to mind, words he might have used when he was still unsaved. Tanya used one of those words just then.

"Holy fuck," she breathed. "Did that just happen?"

Michelle wrapped her in an embrace from behind, their masks clanking together. "It did. It totally did. You got that, right? Tell me you got that."

"I got flashing lights and sounds," she said. "Not sure how much is actually visible."

Buck motioned forward. "Even if the fight itself is a mess, there's a pile of dead Peacekeepers right there. Start recording again."

Buck darted a head, shining the light of his cell phone screen onto the bodies. No, wait—not bodies. They were still alive, breathing slowly. Taken down nonlethally—like Superheroes would. He shivered, some nameless anxiety twisting through his spine. He quickly got back into character, though, putting on the affected Guy Fawkes voice—which sounded more like a wheezy Brooklynite than an English revolutionary—and began narrating.

"I'm standing over the unconscious forms of seven Global Community Peacekeepers. Another lies dead several yards away, killed by a high tech CollinsCorp weapon hitherto unreleased to public or military availability. But these unconscious men, these survivors led by—"

Buck knelt in front of the commander, who slept so soundly despite Buck's presence that he must have been drugged. He found a Peacekeeper identity badge clipped to the man's belt.

"Suhail Akbar." He motioned for Tanya to point the camera down the hall, towards the corpse, the shouldering wreckage.

"You saw the same things we saw. Two men, two women. One of the women flew. I know I heard them refer to each other as Redbird and Blackbird—undoubtedly the Robin-look alike and his blue-clocked friend from the Ramen shop video. Still believe Buck Williams' hackjob now?"

Buck couldn't see Tanya and Michelle's faces, but from their body language, he got the distinct impression they were both laughing at him.


	4. The Unhappy Gays

**Chapter Four**

**The Unhappy Gays**

Chloe Steel-Williams felt antsy. Buck had been gone longer than expected before, but his messages were more cryptic than normal. One thing that they'd worked out together was code words when communicating. "Strangers" meant people who were not confirmed Christians but showed interest in the faith, or at least suspicion towards the Global Community. "Friends" meant confirmed believers—brothers and sisters in Christ, fellow Tribulation Saints. "Business" meant anything related to his official job as publishers of the GC Weekly. "Pleasure" meant any non risky activities not strictly sanctioned by Carpathia or one of his underlings. "Work" meant dangerous, anti-Carpathia stuff that could get him in serious trouble.

Using code words like these, and others, Buck was generally able to get pretty detailed in text, email, and phone messages without any complications.

Which made his most recent series of text messages deeply troublesome.

_**Chlo, got to take care of some more business. Writing a lovely article for GCW website, check for it in a few hours. Will be home as fast as possible. **_

Lovely was another code word, indicating the article was 'full of shit', an old joke from time wasted on the _Horrible-Much-Dot-Com _message boards during his Princeton years.

Then,

_**Change of plans. More work. Follow-up stuff. Keep safe.**_

And finally,

_**Working harder than normal and with stranger friends. Call u when I can. Gotta fly.**_

Stranger friends—what could that mean? Had Buck slipped up and mixed code words accidentally? But _stranger friends_ was an unusual turn of phrase. It wasn't something that he'd say in regular conversation, especially a pithy text message.

The more she thought about it, the more it worried her, and if all she could do was pace around her penthouse fretting, she knew she'd go mad. She sat down at her own computer—an old notebook she'd taken to college, not much for power or security—and drew a sheet of paper from the drawer. She'd copied down the numbers and security info on Buck's Global Community credit card. Amanda and some of the other women back in New Hope Village church had formed a series of shell companies—with names implying vices: Escorts, Breweries, Casinos—to channel large sums of money and other necessary goods from the Global Community into private channels. The goal was to keep the channels open for believers. Chloe didn't know exactly when the legendary Mark of the Beast was supposed to come into effect, but if those who didn't take it couldn't buy or sell, they'd need an underground economy. Currency was easy enough to come by—the billions of US, Mexican, and Canadian dollars rendered officially inert by the new Global Community dollar were just as good as 'real' money in most contexts—and better in some. And with the GC credit line Buck had, digital currency was never going to be a problem—at least, not as long as Buck kept the pretense of loyalty to Carpathia up. Chloe wanted to suck as much blood from Carpathia's fat neck as she could before Buck's credit line was severed.

The trick now was, Chloe had to find one of the Tribulation Force shell companies in the LA region—she didn't want Buck to have to explain why his wife was ordering hookers and blow in New York while he was on assignment on the other side of the continent.

* * *

Robin wasn't surprised when the lights flashed on and the guns raised and pointed his direction. He knew Maxwell Collins. He knew to expect an ambush—and it didn't hurt that Raven's empathic link had given Robin a taste of the emotional ambiance of this room, a tiered antechamber with a line of guards on the mezzanine overlooking a pit.

What he hadn't quite expected as to see Maxwell himself in the room. Raven reached out further with her senses, and Robin felt apprehension, confidence, denial, and above it all Maxwell's towering self confidence, a prickly arrogance that his wealth and genius had awarded him. Robin knew he was already painting an image of himself in the mogul's ever-turning mind—naïve, do-gooder, exploitable. Time to reinforce that notion.

"These men need medical attention," Robin said by way of opening dialog. Starfire still bore the heavier of the two guards behind him, while Robin sat the guard he carried down gently on the ground in front of him. Two guards, one a young woman with a combat shotgun, the other a large man in his forties or fifties, hopped down from the mezzanine. While the latter dragged the two guards over towards a culvert in the wall where a motorized platform allowed access to the mezzanine, the former kept the shotgun trained on Robin's head.

Once all four guards were on the platform, Maxwell flipped a switch and the motor whirred to life, taking the platform up to the higher level. As the wounded guards were carted off, Maxwell stepped onto the platform and rode it down until he was standing before Robin.

Collins was an imposing figure—not egregiously tall, but wide like an ox and with a deceptively calm demeanor. His hair, was deep red, much like that of his son, while his beard and mustache, though starting to show signs of gray, were so neatly trimmed that they looked almost sharp enough to cut glass.

"I must ask," Maxwell said, "what your intentions were here. Following a Global Community squadron into a tunnel so secret I can only assume a traitor sold them its location? Taking down that squad of trained peacekeepers, and taking the time to save my guards in the process. You have skills, children, but if you meant to impress me, if you intended to threaten me, you'll have to try harder."

"Don't play coy," Raven said. "We saw your broadcast. You wanted to find us. Recruit us."

Raven's accent seemed jarring, her harsh tones and her inflections—not Indian as her disguise would suggest, but unearthly. Perhaps it was her native accent—Raven had always spoke fluent English, but she spent her first fifteen years in a parallel dimension called Azarath. Maybe her multilingual fluency was even more impressive than Robin had thought.

"Hire you," Maxwell said. "I did not get where I am today by expecting favors for nothing, my dear."

"We're listening," said Robin. "What do you want us to do?"

Maxwell's thin smile curved like the Grinch. "Tell me, Redbird, do you believe in God?"

It was not a question Robin had expected. "The jury's out for me. I've seen enough to know there are things in this world bigger than us."

"Bigger than you, perhaps," said Maxwell. "Before, I thought I had it all figured out. Religion is a crock. Believers of all stripes are hypocrites or useful fools. The only thing in this world that matters is perception—and the power to shape it."

"You feel differently now?" said Starfire.

"Oh yes. Millions of adults around the world vanish, all of them Christian fundamentalists. Every child gone with a _pop_ as the air fills the vacuum they left. And a mad man from a tiny armpit of Europe becomes the king of the planet, and makes a treaty with Israel. I've had dealings with the self-proclaimed prophets—the John Hagees and Franklin Grahams of the world. I don't forget they existed like all the masses that worship the Romanian oaf."

"Maxwell Collins is a believer?" Beast Boy said. "I don't buy it. You're the Grand Asshole of Corporate America. Or were, back when America existed."

"My reputation precedes me, yes," Maxwell said. "I admit I've had regretful dealings in the past, that my ambition has outstripped my compassion. But to answer your question, I'm a believer in the sense that I've come to see the obvious: that God exists. But faith, trust? These things are the refuge of a coward. God has revealed the truth to the world, and that truth is that God is a bastard. He took his sycophants and gave the world to the devil. I want you to help me take it back."

* * *

Gerald Fitzhugh was once the President of the United States. People still called him Mr. President, sure. And his official title was still President—President of the North American Executive office. A shiny title for a shiny decoration on Nicolae Carpathia's desk. Fitzhugh was a goddamn war hero, the second black president of the United States, and the least divisive son of a bitch in the White House since Richard Nixon—who was hated by Red and Blue States alike.

Now it was all meaningless. There was no more war to honor the heroes of, no more United States Constitution to defend, and no more Red States and Blue States to reconcile. There was just Carpathia, just the Global Community, and the traitors that made it happen.

Well, that was the narrative Carpathia would have you believe. But America wasn't digested by the Beast, not yet. Not by a long shot. And neither was the U.K. or any other self-respecting country. Fitzhugh had always abhorred the right wing militias, but they were the only ones left with the hardware he needed. The CIA was disbanded and the FBI swallowed by the GC bureaucracy, but there were plenty of dissenting agents who still believed in national sovereignty. The DHS had practically imploded over night, with a skeleton staff left behind for the GC to disband. The rest of the department had gone underground. Together, they'd been named the American Agency—using the double meaning of Agency to signify that Carpathia would not determine the fate of the free world.

So here was the game plan: most of the world's remaining armaments (which sources assured him were far greater than the ten percent figure Carpathia officially prattled about) were thousands of miles away in Iraq, or en route there, in no condition to be deployed. The last of the former UN Ambassadors were clearing out their offices either to return home or move to New Babylon; they'd be gone by the end of the week. Much of the GC infrastructure still operated out of the UN buildings in New York, the loyalists and collaborators. As soon as the allies were clear, the President would call an attack on the UN. Cripple the New York nerve center while the British went after the European command in Brussels. The Egyptians would sack the military forces in New Babylon—which were none too popular among the Iraqis themselves.

Other key personnel his Agents had identified were located in the Chicago and Ft. Worth areas, and would be hit in smaller militia-based strikes. There would be casualties. There would likely be retaliation in some form. Though nominally Methodist, Fitzhugh hadn't been much of a religious man before. Now, every chance he got he would pray—pray for success, pray for courage, and pray for forgiveness for what he was about to do.

* * *

Collins' physical examinations were surprisingly non-invasive. No ultrasound, so Starfire's nine stomachs went unnoticed. The X-rays the CollinsCorps scientists administered were somehow absorbed by Starfire's alien physiology—Tamaranians did not normally absorb anything higher on the spectrum than UV rays. Robin gave her a quizzical look after she'd explained the results, but Starfire's expression, even through the make-up and contacts, had given Robin the hint: _don't ask._

The general lack of interest Collins showed in probing and dissecting his freak squad perplexed Robin as he and the three other Titans made their way down the hall towards what Maxwell referred to as his 'command room', but when they arrived the picture became clearer. They stood above the tower's lobby on a mezzanine overlooking a clearly struggling operation. Several dozen men and women darted about the room, and half again that were inactive, leaning against walls, crumpled in corners, or laying out on stretchers. Many were wounded, others children. Few looked combat ready.

The Titans were Maxwell's gift horse and he was afraid to look it in the mouth.

"Friends," Maxwell announced from the edge of the mezzanine. "Brothers in arms. I told you not to believe propaganda. Buck Williams and his Global Community Weekly sought to assure the world that the viral video of super powered individuals was a hoax. Well, look, see for yourselves. Does this look like a hoax to you?"

Maxwell stepped aside, and motioned the Titans to step forward, and Robin signaled for Raven and Starfire to hover, display their powers. Beast Boy shifted his face into that of a large wolf and let out a growl; the makeup held through the transformation, for the most part, so that no green noticeably broke through.

A small cheer grew from the ground floor, and rolled towards the back. Many of the people stood and looked up at the Titans in awe. Robin felt the sting of their admiration, the guilty knowledge that they hadn't come to Maxwell to inspire the poor souls he'd wrangled into his rebellion but simply to get help and material resources for their own ends.

When the impromptu ceremony was over, Maxwell led them to a room off to the side where several far more competent looking members of the militia sat gathered around a holographic map of the city. Three of them stood up and saluted Maxwell. The others bristled, glaring at the Titans with suspicion. Maxwell pressed some buttons on the console that switched map to a globe, then zoomed in on North America, showing three red flashing lights—one near Dallas, another just west of Chicago, and a third on Long Island.

"The Carpathian government has amassed three sizeable caches of the supposedly-decommissioned military hardware our government oh-so-inexplicably surrendered." Maxwell turned. "Heavy armaments, including small scale tactical ballistics, are part of the arsenal. No resistance against Carpathia and his forces can be mounted as long as he has the capability of nuclear retaliation."

"You want us to shut down the nukes," Robin said. "We can do that. We'll need hardware and transportation."

"They'll be provided," Maxwell said. "Your friend—Empyrean—seems uniquely resistant to radiation."

"His friend is capable of speaking for herself," Starfire said, hovering closer to Robin and Collins. "The pain I endured in becoming this way will never let me to forget the cost of my power."

"I'm certain," Maxwell said with a smug grin, which quickly transformed into affected sympathy when Starfire's hands lit up with green energy.

"You have no need to fear torture or experimentation from me," Collins said. "I would love to study your abilities further non-invasively, no doubt, but the fact of the matter is, time may be running out. They've already come after me once—likely searching for the four of you. Eliminating the threat of the Global Community is my highest priority. But I must make myself completely clear, I do not want you to kill them. I want the people of this country, this planet to see that I am not the villain here, that the devil is in the dictator. Traitors to the human race will be tried for their crimes in the years to come, but if you decide to make yourselves executioners, the people of Earth will never be swayed to our side."

"Don't sweat it," Beast Boy said. "That's not how we operate to start with."

"Yes," Maxwell said, stroking his silvered beard. "You're perhaps the most peculiar mercenaries I've ever seen."

"Seen many?" Raven said sharply.

"More than you'd think." Collins motioned towards a nearby door, which slid open. "The lift down to the armory is this way, children."

* * *

Buck paced nervously in the predawn hours as Tanya and Michelle edited, scrubbed, uploaded, proxied, and mirrored their video out the proverbial ass. He was already knee deep in perhaps the most damaging expose of Carpathia ever published, his wife and father in law could be, at that very moment, in grave danger thanks to his suspicious activity, and the Guy Fawkes mask on his face had rough straps that had chafed raw patches on his face. Patience was supposed to be a fruit of the Holy Spirit, but right now the only fruit he had left was Self Control—it took all he could muster not to storm out of the hotel room that minute and get on a plane to New York.

"Okay, done," Michelle said at last, sliding her laptop across the bed to Tanya. "The video is live and viral. They're never finding out whose computer it came from, but they'll know we're in Los Angeles. We have to get out of here and lay low."

"Reece said we could crash with her for a while, though if we do that I'll probably lose my job." Tanya said. "And Buck needs to fly home."

"Then we'll drive him to LAX on the way out of town," Michelle said. "And, love, your job is not worth your life."

"Okay," Buck said. "Let's think logistically. I'll take a quick shower here. I show up in New York disheveled and rank and that's just more suspicion thrown my way. I guess your friend can accommodate you both."

"I think she might have a house big enough," said Michelle. Some sort of in joke between them, he guessed, from the laughs they were fighting off.

"Then we'll get to it," Buck said.

* * *

Thirty minutes later, Tanya's van jerked to a stop. Buck, already antsy, leaned forward from the back seat.

"What now?"

"Roadblock ahead," Tanya said, pale. Michelle, in the seat beside him, clutched the sides of her seat., tensing up until Tanya put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. Buck's mind lurched, simultaneously touched by the caring and hostile towards the deviant sexual nature of their relationship.

"Those are Peacekeepers," Michelle said. "This isn't just some regular police action. They're already looking for the source of the video."

"No. Can't be, not this soon. Probably they want to find the super-hero squad."

"It's probably both," Buck said. "I know how this works. They'll have shut down all outgoing flights. Shit!"

"What do we do now?" Michelle said.

Tanya took a deep breath, leaned her head down against the steering wheel. "Michelle," she said. "Slip out the back and flip the plate over."

As Michelle clambered into the back, brushing by Buck, he leaned into the front. "Flip the plate?"

"Fake license plate," she breathed. "Or rather, a real license plate ripped off from someone's car."

"Won't that put them in danger?" Buck said.

"Not likely," said Michelle. "The plates came from a car that belonged to Crystal Davenport-Collins."

The van jerked and shook as Tanya backed it over a curve, lurched as she drove it over the opposite curve and across the median.

"Who?" Buck said, clutching his seatbelt so tightly that the edges hurt his hands.

"Dead wife of Maxwell Collins," said Michelle. "Guaranteed not to have an APB out on them at least."

"Collins' wife died years ago," Buck said, recalling a brief article Verna Zee had filed with his former boss Steve Plank. He had thought the sentence structure needed work. "So shouldn't her tags be expired?"

"Expired tags are the least of the police's worries," said Tanya. "We're in the middle of the damned Apocalypse. I don't think pedal-to-the-metal down Santa Monica Blvd. would get you pulled over-"

Black, red, white, and overwhelming noise. The crunch of metal and shatter of glass. And pain, all over, pain. And the dizziness. The world upset, stomach turning. Blood, the smell of gasoline. Silence.

No, not silence. Sirens, the beep, beep, beep of the door being open while the keys were in the engine. Buck tried to reach down and take the keys but found his arm seemed unmanagbely heavy. Then he realized it was because the keys weren't down, but up. His sense of gravity and equilibrium fought to reassert themselves. He wretched and thanked the Lord he hadn't eaten anything.

"Buck!" Tanya's thick voice was raspy and strained. "Can you hear me? Oh Jesus, let him hear me."

"I don't see you!" Buck called up from the crumpled van. His brain had finally worked out that the majority of the pain he felt was coming from his right leg. "I see Michelle."

Book looked closer. Smoke had started to fill the front of the van. Michelle's arm hung limp at her side, pale and bruised, the fishnet sleeves ripped.

"Oh no," he breathed.

"She's out cold," Tanya said, adding a string of profanities for good measure. Buck heard squeak of the front seat's leather and saw Tanya clamber over, smack at Michelle's seatbelt button. The latch disengaged but the belt couldn't fully recoil as it slid under her arm.

"I'm going to try and pull you out," said Tanya. "Do your best to climb!"

She lay belly-down in the seat and reached an arm out. Buck grabbed hold of it, and pressed off the damaged cable control console, then used his own chair to boost himself out, He clambered up, saw something looming behind the cracked glass of the windshield, and finally pulled himself out. The driver's side door of the van was gone altogether; Buck pulled the keys out of the ignition just to silence the interminable beeping, then finally tumbled out of the van onto the wet street.

The water from a fire hydrant ran down the street, soaking his clothes. But worse still, he saw what had hit them: A Peacekeeper armored personnel carrier, bearing the logo of the Global Community on its side. The driver appeared to be unconscious, and the passenger was trying to revive him.

Buck's mind began racing; his first instinct was to hide his face, make sure nobody recognized him. His second was to use his security clearance to get the Peacekeepers to help him. But what if the crash had been no accident? From the back seat Buck hadn't even seen them coming. They might have intentionally run them off the road.

Three armed Peacekeepers clambered out of the back of the APC and moved toward Buck and Tanya, and the crashed van.

"What is wrong with you!" demanded the man on point. "You stupid fucks blew through the red light. You're lucky you weren't killed."

"Please, I'm sorry. My wife is still in the van. I can't get her out." Tanya seemed on the verge of tears. Buck wished he could help, but how? Blow his cover? Did he even have his security clearance on him?

"That's not our problem," the Peacekeeper spat. "Show us identification and registration for the vehicle."

"My I.D. is at my house you sick fucks," Tanya spat. "My wife is in that car. She's injured, she needs—"

The sound was defining, the muzzle flash blinding. One shot, fired into the air silenced Tanya. Buck frantically searched his pockets for his own ID, for anything that might get them out of the scrape.

"Your fucking wife can fucking rot," the man growled. "There are dangerous cyber terrorists on the loose and if you don't show me some damn ID in the next ten seconds you're both under arre—AAGCKK!"

Tanya had leapt forward in the blink of an eye, grabbing the Peacekeeper by his throat; she smashed the gun aside with her fist, and it thundered twice more, Buck's heart seizing with each shot. The other two Peacekeepers raised their rifles at Tanya, but couldn't get a clear shot through the wide man and his black-and-blue armor.

"Listen to me you bastard. The love of my life needs medical attention and I'm not letting some pig with a gun keep me from helping her."

"Ma'am!" the rear guard said. "Let him go or we'll be forced to shoot."

The other, who up until now Buck hadn't noticed was a woman, stepped to the side and pointed her rifle towards the van. "How about this: let him go and I don't pull this trigger."

Buck's gut twisted into a knot. "NO!" he shouted, pulling out his wallet. "Listen I'm—"

_**BLAM BLAM BLAM**_

Buck saw Chloe's face in the muzzle flashes as the rear guard opened fire. He closed his eyes, and prayed death would claim him quickly, and that Chloe could forgive him for getting himself killed in such a stupid manner. The funny thing was, he didn't even feel the bullets. Or maybe he had, and just forgot as his soul departed for heaven…

"What the fuck?"

The profanity jarred him back to plain old Earth. His eyes snapped open.

There, hovering inches in front of his torso, the three bullets coated in a writhing black light.

The sound of rockets flaring to life filled Buck's ears, and an enormous black tank flew overhead, launching itself from a shattered overpass. The tank landed with an immense crash behind the APC, then revved up again, slamming into the APC and pushing it off the road. It rolled into a ditch, the driver and passenger shouting as it rolled over.

Redbird and Empyrean leapt out of the Tank, each taking one of the two guards, while dark power erupted from the asphalt and coalesced into the one called Blackbird.

"Peacekeepers," she said disdainfully. Blackbird raised a hand and the thug's gun flew apart, the pieces scattering all over the ground. She made a whip-like motion with her hands, and the dark energy slammed into him and threw him on the ground.

"Jesus Christ!" exclaimed Tanya.

"Not quite," said Blackbird. She scanned the area. "The other woman that followed us into the CollinsCorp tunnel. Where is she?"

"You knew?" Buck said, though he was immediately interrupted.

"My wife," Tanya said. "She's in the van. She hit her head. Please, we have to get her to a hospital."

"Hospital's locked down," said Redbird. "We've been monitoring the channels. They're after us hard—and if you three did what I think you did when you followed us into that tunnel, you'll be on their hit list too."

"But—" Tanya moved toward the mercenary.

"Empyrean, get her out of that van, then blow it up." Redbird motioned toward Blackbird.

"I can heal her," said the woman in black. "But you need to come with us. Los Angeles is not safe."

"Nowhere is safe," said Tanya.

A series of strategic metal rendings later, Empyrean had freed Michelle from the car. Lines of blood ran down her face, and the right side of her head was badly bruised. Buck winced; Tanya sobbed. No vehicle, possible fugitive status, fifteen hundred miles from home. Sure, why not get in the car with strange beings with superpowers? He'd done crazier things since the Rapture.

As Empyrean's green flames seared the news van down to slag, Buck started towards the mercenary tank. In his exhaustion, he scarcely noticed the impact as his soggy boot kicked his cellular phone into stream of hydrant water, and didn't miss it until long after it vanished into a storm drain.


End file.
